The 2020 U.S. Open will have a different feeling.
The tennis tournament thrives on the passion of fans.
But this year, for the first time ever,
the Grand Slam will be spectator-less.
And it's the USTA's work with IBM—embracing hybrid cloud and AI—
that has prepared them to adapt in the COVID era,
where sports can go on with fans everywhere, except on site.
And for IBM, the work to help the US Open innovate began nearly 30 years ago.
In 1992, IBM became the official technology partner
of the USTA and the US Open.
In 1995, IBM and the USTA introduced
the first official tournament website, USOpen.org.
Then in 2007, SlamTracker launched to provide
a live, interactive view and point-by-point scoring.
By 2011, the USTA and IBM collaborated to develop Keys to the Match,
which analyzed 39 million data points
to reveal insights that indicate how players need to perform to win.
Fast forward to today.
IBM continues to help the USTA innovate
by ushering the game into the modern era.
With enhanced fan and player experiences—
built with artificial intelligence,
and underpinned with the hybrid cloud.
And 2020 is a year like no other.
In a recent IBM survey of U.S. sports fans,
nearly half—48%—think having an interactive digital experience
has become more important since the coronavirus outbreak.
For Gen Z, that number jumps to 64%.
IBM and the USTA made a massive pivot to create new fan experiences for fans everywhere.
Experts from IBM iX,
IBM's digital design agency,
collaborated with the USTA to create new fan experiences
based on IBM's AI and hybrid cloud technologies.
The result: the deployment of three entirely new digital experiences—
two of which are based on Natural Language Processing,
or NLP, from IBM Watson.
IBM will facilitate several debates among fans
on USOpen.org—just not how you would think.
It will start with a question—such as,
“Is Chris Evert the best to ever play the game?”
IBM will use NLP capabilities in Watson Discovery
to analyze millions of news and sports sources for insights—
converting unstructured data into pro and con arguments for the debate.
Fans can then weigh in and add their opinions to the debate,
so that arguments can actually change over time.
This tool sifts through millions of articles,
blogs and thought leaders leading into a match to gather insights.
It then uses Natural Language Generation technology from IBM Research
to translate structured data—like statistics from prior matches— into narrative form,
so fans can get fact-based insights on the players
and their opponents ahead of match play.
Among the challenges the USTA faced this year
was how to recreate the sound of fans inside the stadium.
IBM leveraged its AI Highlights technology to recreate crowd sounds
gleaned from hundreds of hours of video footage
captured during last years’ tournament.
The AI Sounds toolkit will be available
to the production teams in-stadium and at ESPN.
With fans largely unable to attend live sporting events in 2020,
the demand for engaging technologies using AI has been accelerated.
With technology supported by a scalable hybrid cloud,
IBM has transformed its offerings to engage with tennis fans globally
in this new virtual environment.